Pickets at Every School to Bring Home a Victory
Shout out to all of the schools and programs who wore red in unity at our last bargaining date on March 6th. We love seeing the pictures of our SDEA solidarity so please keep them coming! Our next bargaining dates are 3/23 and 4/10 so mark your calendar red on these dates.
Coming on the heels of our powerful Flood the Board action at the Ed. Center in December, when we packed the auditorium with SDEA and CSEA members, we started to see positive movement from the District at the bargaining table for the first time. On February 9th, the District proposed to protect our fully-paid family health benefits and to extend health coverage over summer break to temporary contract members. This will help address the staffing shortage in SDUSD by retaining educators on temporary contracts who could go to other districts to get family health benefits sooner.
After parent presentations on our student-centered bargaining demands at schools throughout the district by SDEA members, on February 23rd we finally saw a serious response from the District to our 10% + 10% wage proposal. The District proposed a 6.56% salary increase retroactive for this school year and they have committed to an additional unspecified increase for the 2023-24 school year that is dependent on how other cost items like class size shake out in the bargaining process.
The District is receiving significant new ongoing funding this school year and next school year and our salaries need to be commensurate with 1) increased funding coming into the District and 2) the skyrocketing cost of living in our region. Increasing educator salaries is the most effective means of solving the staffing crisis by giving our district the tools to recruit and keep the highest quality educators.
Another big win at the bargaining table on February 23rd was the District agreeing in concept to SDEA’s proposal to double elementary preparation time and student enrichment time. While the details of how this would be implemented still need to be ironed out, this improvement in our contract is a considerable step toward achieving our bargaining platform priority of addressing educator burnout.
All of the recent progress at the bargaining table is directly connected to the power that educators have demonstrated in our recent collective actions. We still have a ways to go, however, to win all of the demands in our contract campaign that will bring about the schools that our students deserve. We are still waiting on responses to numerous SDEA proposals that have been presented as long as 3 months ago on items such as lower class size, more counselors and improvements to special education workload.
This means that we need to keep the pressure up on the SDUSD School Board and leadership through pickets with educators and parents at every school the week of March 13. The pickets in all corners of the district will amplify our message and give our SDEA Bargaining Team the strength needed to bring home a victory for educators, students, parents and the school communities we serve.
Together we are stronger!
